Please join us January 31 for opening night of our 2020 season, when we will host memoirists Pam Houston and Dorothy Rice. Houston’s story, excerpted from her recent book, Deep Creek: Finding Hope in the High Country, will be performed by an exciting new voice to our stage, Caro Marks. And Rice’s story, excerpted from her new book, Gray is the New Black: A Memoir of Self Acceptance, will be performed by an audience favorite, Gay Cooper. Please reserve and donate $10 for your spot at this special event.
Christine O’Brien’s memoir, CRAVE, A Memoir of Food and Longing, was hailed as a “page turner” by Booklist and “a 20th Century fairytale” by The New York Times. The daughter of Academy Award-, Emmy Award-, and Golden Globe-winning movie and television producer Edgar J. Scherick, Christine grew up in New York City and Beverly Hills, and has been writing since she was nine years old. She’s the host of the podcast, Good Morning Writing!, and her lyrical essays and short stories have appeared in The Seneca Review and The Slush Pile Magazine, among other publications. She has taught memoir writing at The Book Passage in Corte Madera, CA and was the nonfiction workshop teacher at the Leopardi Writer’s Conference in Recanati, Italy in July 2019. She lives in the Bay area with her husband and two children and teaches at St. Mary’s College
Jen Palmares Meadows’ essays have appeared in Literary Hub, The Rumpus, Fourth Genre, Brevity, Denver Quarterly, The Los Angeles Review, and elsewhere. She is a 2018 Edna St. Vincent Millay Colony Fellow, and a recipient of a 2019 Sustainable Arts Foundation Grant. A Sacramento writer, she earned a M.A. in Creative Writing from California State University Sacramento and is currently completing Betting On Brown, an experimental coming-of-age gambling memoir, mixing lyrical prose with card games, recipes, and reportage
A frequent reader at Stories on Stage Sacramento, Kelley Ogden is an actress, writer, director and producer, who was most recently seen onstage in the Capital Stage productions of Between Riverside and Crazy and Sweat. In addition to working with Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, Main Street Theatre Works and Theater Galatea, Ogden co-founded KOLT Run Creations, a local fringe theater company. She earned a BFA in performance from The Theatre School at DePaul University in Chicago. She will read an excerpt from Christine S. O’Brien’s CRAVE, A Memoir of Food and Longing.
Alma is an English major at Sacramento City College and delighted to have her short story, “Oil Smudged Spectacles,” selected to be read at Stories on Stage Sacramento. Creative writing has always been her emotional outlet. “I’ve learned a lot through the written word and hope to share and create the same effect with others
Seth was born and raised in Sacramento, then went back east for college. He lives in New York and holds an MFA in Writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where he works as an admission officer. He is an occasional film critic and is currently at work on a novel. He thanks editor Alison Hinton for including his short story “The Present Progressive” in the machine, the literary magazine of Folsom Lake Community College
Andrey is a former Editor-in-Chief of American River Review. A former resident of Antelope, CA, he’s currently serving in the Peace Corps in Thailand. His short story, “The Prophet of Taco Bell,” appears in the 2019 American River Review
Katherine Bahena-Benitez is a graduating senior at Sacramento State Department of Theatre and Dance. During their time at CSUS, they’ve been part of the following productions: In The Time of the Butterflies as Young Dede, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Peter and the Starcatcher, and In The Heights as Abuela Claudia. Katherine has also participated in the Sacramento Shakespeare Festival, playing the role of Eugenie in The Count of Monte Cristo and Antonio in Twelfth Night. They have worked with Teatro Espejo, a Sacramento Latinx/Chicanx Theatre company, for the past three years, appearing in Electricidad as Ifigenia and Enfrascada as Cat/Marta/Karina. Katherine’s interest for the arts reaches across all areas as they currently advocate for LGBTQ+ people of color through spoken word performance.
Eric has performed all across the United States and Europe. Sacramento theatregoers have seen him most recently at Capital Stage and KOLT Run productions, in roles as diverse as Henry V, Macbeth, Biff in Death of a Salesman, Prospero, Shylock, Pale in Burn This and Barry Champlain in Talk Radio. He was Artistic Director of the Quantum Theatre Company in Los Angeles and the founder of Resurrection Theatre here in Sacramento.
Diane Kallas lives at Muir Commons CoHousing Community in Davis where she has learned to cook meals for 70 people and how to weed an orchard. She could be writing a collection of short stories where every one begins with “I can’t believe what happened to my neighbor this week,” but instead she spends her time nursing several aged cats, and working as a hospital-to-home teacher for critically ill K-12 students. A former technical writer and amateur upholsterer, she has a Master’s degree in Literature and a Juris Doctor, neither of which have really led to steady employment. She has been published in Caketrain and the Boston Literary Magazine, and has had a flash piece read at Stories on Stage Sacramento. 
Krystle will be reading “They Told Us Not To Say This” by Jenn Alandy Trahan. A Bay-area based stage and screen actor, Krystle’s 
Returning to Stories on Stage Sacramento to read Diane Kallas’ “Spud” is Sacramento actor Ruby Sketchley. She’s familiar to Sacramento theatergoers for her appear;ances at Sacramento Theatre Company, Capital Stage, Big Idea Theatre, KOLT, and MSTW. She’s also performed as an 1850’s tour guide in Old Sacramento. Ruby is a former company member of Big Idea Theatre and a former board member of the Capital Film Arts Alliance. She and her husband own Tiny Octopus Productions, which produced the award winning documentary In The Parlor. 
We’re pleased to welcome Matthew Hanjoong to Stories on Stage Sacramento. Matthew is a graduate of California State University Sacramento and with a major in Theatre, and recently completed an apprenticeship with Capitol Stage, where he was featured in the Apprentice Showcase and Playwrights’ Revolution, a showcase of new work. He’s appeared in productions at Sac State, American River College, and Fair Oaks Playhouse. 
Ethan Ireland is a multidisciplinary veteran of the film, television and theater trade, with sixteen years as a working professional in both performance and technical roles. The son of noted ‘lit noir’ author Patrick Ireland, Ethan is a writer & director of several short films, and has worked as a voice actor and a performer for both stage and screen since 1995. Most recently he appeared in EMH’s productions of After Hours and An Almost Perfect Person. He has performed at Now Hear This: A Story and Music Performance Series produced by Atim Udoffia.
Stories on Stage Sacramento 